derBlog

RadioTweet was born out of necessity, as they say…or at least out of a desire to figure out how and why a new technology (Twitter in this case) might work for a particular purpose. My friend, Derek, DJs on WTUL, Tulane’s radio station, every other week…among the many other things that he does… He’s been co-hosting “Stage and Screen” for almost 15 years (FYI: Sunday mornings…currently scheduled at 10am). Last spring, several of us had begun to use Twitter in earnest and Derek began to wonder how he could use it in tandem with his show.

The DJs at WTUL already log each track that they play as part of internet streaming licensing agreements (you can listen to WTUL live on the web here). WTUL uses a web service called Radioactivity to take care of this task. A bonus of the need to log each track is that playlists can then be easily shared with your audience. So you can see all of WTUL’s playlists posted on their Radioactivity page where you can search by date or by show.

So, Derek was already logging his show, the question was how to wire this up with Twitter. My answer was to sit down and write RadioTweet.

Not a lot of planning went into this. I happened to be using Processing for some other projects and had been looking at some of the Java libraries for Twitter to see how easy they might be to implement in Processing. Derek’s problem of posting his playlist to Twitter just gave me the opportunity to try it on a real problem.

After a couple of tries…going back and forth between screen scraping the data and using the RSS feed (which to this day breaks on a regular basis)…we got something that is stable and workable. Its not pretty, but it does the job it needs to do. Check out Derek’s Twitter feed every other week and you’ll be greeted with a stream of Tweets listing each track that he’s playing (…sometimes to the chagrin of some of his regular followers!). We know that it is pretty successful because we can track the bit.ly link that we use in the Tweet and see the spikes every two weeks (click the image bellow to see it bigger):

Again, we’re not talking about thousands upon thousands of clicks here, but its a noticeable tick every two weeks. And I think that is my point here. Software development doesn’t always have to be for the next greatest iPhone app or a multi-platform, immersive game or even another word processing clone…or for that matter even a website… Sometimes, it can just be a down-and-dirty answer to a problem that is right in front of you, right now.

I think this concept of homemade software really hit home to me when I was reading Visualizing Data by Ben Fry (the co-creator of Processing). Several times in the book, he writes a short program to manipulate some data. The program is only used once for a very specific thing. Almost more than anything, this concept seemed very empowering to me (though the rest of the book is very cool!). Really, this is the core of the Processing philosophy as well: make your own tools. Processing is primarily concerned with visual representations (which is why I use it in my own work and in my classes), but it…or Flash…or any other language you happen to know…can be used for much less glamorous, if every bit as useful, stuff.

Of course, this requires some programming literacy, and its been this particular thought pattern that has convinced me of the the need for programming literacy. You can see the popularity of physical production skills in the DIY/Maker movements of the last couple of years. The DIY software movement is gaining ground as well, but is still far behind…and perhaps a little bit more difficult to explain and justify to those without any programming experience. But hopefully little projects like RadioTweet will show when and where homemade software might be useful and inspire some folks to explore programming for themselves.

RadioTweet may have now run its course. Radioactivity is testing a Twitter feed of the WTUL playlist. We’ll have to see if their implementation serves the DJs at the station. Really, even more than all the DJs at the station, we’ll have to see if it serves Derek. Because it was Derek’s problem that it was built to solve in the first place…and if he has his way, there will probably be another version of RadioTweet coming in the future (he’s asking for Facebook integration in the next revision…).

/der

I’ve seen chainless bikes before, but this on dispenses with the bottom tube as well. That + the placement of the peddles makes me wonder what it would ride like. You think it pivots at the top tube/front fork?

Hmm….